A Raw Force

They were mounting the hill when they heard, from up the block and around the corner, a loud short crash followed by metal clambering and metal falling. They stopped, exchanged hesitant looks under the streetlight, and then Corin broke off and walked quickly with quiet strides to the corner.

“God!” Sal whispered loudly to Corin’s back, “Can we just go back and around?”

Percy shifted his duffle bag from one shoulder to the other, grabbed his roller bag by the extension handle and followed slowly after Corin. Percy walked smooth. Smooth and slow, face deep, brow furrowed, hair a little overgrown, which he flipped out of his squinting eyes with a flick of his neck, the way a cow swats away a fly with its tail.

Sal looked around: ahead, behind and above, hoping absently that anything would give him a strong reason to call Corin back. The street, however, was empty, the sky was only a guess beyond the streetlight and ahead he saw Corin’s face eating eagerly at the scene unfolding out of sight to Sal. Sal watched Percy labor to the corner, full of what seemed like boredom, and stop, pull his head back and squint forward.

The sound came again, a crash and clamber and falling metal and Corin stepped around the corner. Percy followed and Sal picked up his own bags, following the briskly after.

There, on the main street, was a drunken man with bare arms, struggling to raise a rentable City Bike over his head. In front of him was the corral of other city bikes and on top of them, two more mangled ones he had thrown. The man was maybe forty or fifty. He wore regular, blue jeans, a large brass belt buckle, a black t-shirt and leather working boots, His hair was long and dark and messy and falling in his eyes and clearly making the whole awkward affair more difficult and irritating for him. His body was skinny and his narrow biceps were lined with meaty, tubular veins that pressed under his skin. He was extremely tan like he worked each day under the sun, which made him look red, or maybe gold.

Finally after straining unsuccessfully with his back, he squatted down with good form and loaded the bike above his head and onto his shoulders and the lobbed it with a bending and straightening of his legs and arms, so that it flew and lande with the same crash, clamber and sound of metal falling.

He then took out his phone and unlocked another City Bike, and with movements that demonstrated some absurd sense of duty, squatted, loaded and lobbed the new bike into the mangled mix of rentable bikes. He seemed, to Sal, set on continuing this until he passed out or ran out of bikes. And, after each new bike landed on the others, he would pick up a U-lock from a pile on the ground, unlock it and use it to fasten the newly mangled bike to the rest of the bikes, fixing them all together in a rigid structure.

Sal was watching from the corner, with Corin and Percy a few steps ahead, when they all heard a shout. It was a pretty shout from down the street behind Sal. It was strong and angry, but sweet, and grew sweeter to Sal as he realized the girl, whose chest and mouth had made it, was sweet. She was running and yelling at the man. Her hair was bouncing and every feminine signal of loveliness and such seemed to be firing, to Sal, uniquely in her. She ignored the boys as she rounded the corner, and cursed the man, and he crumpled into a child.

“You asshole!” she said.

He lowered his head “Sorry Mare. I’m sorry,” he slurred.

“Go home. Go,” she pointed back and followed him as he grabbed the remaining locks and walked off, swaying.

The boys watched them, crowded around the corner.

“That was amazing!” Corin concluded, “what the fuck do you think he was out here all drunk and riled up for?”

“Come on, let’s get to the house,” Percy said, shifting his bag and furrowing his brow to look at his phone, “we’ve got like four blocks left to go.”

“She’s beautiful,” Sal said, “She’s like an angel.”

Corin smiled and he and Sal watched the pair go down the street.

“Wasn’t she?” Sal said again.

Percy said, “I don’t know, I only saw her face.”

Sal lingered at the corner, watching as Corin and Percy continued up the street without him. He saw the older man fall face first into the brick siding of a house and then slide down onto the ground in front of the girl. The girl kneeled beside her father, trying to wrap his limp, heavy arm around her neck. She looked up between her grunting efforts to see Sal, mouth slightly open, watching from the corner. Her face became impassionately annoyed and looked quickly away from Sal’s so as not to become involved.

“Guys!” Sal poked his head around the corner and yelled to the other two, “We need to help her, her dad fell.”